Deployment Success

Let's say that you ran the health checks on your cluster and received data_replication_check failure, what does it mean and how do you fix it?  The NCC health check data_replication_check helps to ensure that the customers are not impacted by an extremely rare condition which can result in the inability to restore from snapshots. This issue is covered in Field Advisory 28.   Scenario 1 - Cluster is running an old version of AOS.Scenario 2 - Cluster was recently upgraded, but has snapshots created before the AOS upgrade. For a full explanation and the solution for both scenarios check out the health check documentation at: KB-2089. To make sure

Scalability is the backbone of any industry solution, hence with ever-increasing workloads, it is natural for us to add new nodes in our existing infrastructure to make it scalable and highly efficient. Nutanix provides a feature which  allows you to add new nodes to your existing cluster and increase the cluster overall capacity.    A question lingering in our mind right now  Do we have some guidelines regarding cluster expansion?    Cluster expansion depends on the AOS version, hypervisor type (AHV, ESXi, Hyper-V, or Citrix Hypervisor), data-at-rest encryption status, and certain hardware configuration factors.  

It may be helpful to determine what commands were run previously to troubleshoot a current issue. Let’s first understand what aCLIand nCLI command utilities are.   aCLI: utility to create, modify and manage VMs in AHV. nCLI: utility to manage cluster operations.   The history files are hidden and are persistent across reboots. Below article explains how to  retrieve commands history: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/kbs/details/?targetId=kA032000000TSsjCAG 

Did you know that each node of the cluster keeps records of the upgrade history of its components? Quite convenient to look at when determining the timeline of events during troubleshooting.    Each of the components below has a dedicated history file: AOS Hypervisor NCC Files Hardware CVM memory

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of April 5-11, 2020. KB 8842 - NCC Health Check: cassandra_ssd_size_check KB 9198 - [Prism Central] Prism Central 5.16.1.2 - Docker logs for docker based services are missing KB 9209 - Zoom Security Statement KB 9211 - How to remove Ghost NICs on Windows Note: You may need to log in to the Support Portal to view some of these articles.

I have read in the ECA course some recommandation from Nutanix regarding AHV Networking specialy for LACP. If this is a best practice please Nutanix do as usual and set it by default :  "ovs-vsctl set port br0-up other_config:lacp-fallback- ab=true” "ovs-vsctl set port br0-up other_config:lacp-time=fast"

You may have encountered an alert about PE-PC Connection Failure, or regarding IDF db to db sync. It’s possible that you had a visible issue with Prism Central’s management and monitoring of clusters, but also possible that you didn’t.   What are these alerts for? How do we know if there’s really a problem? What can we do to fix it? I would like to answer these questions for you.   Prism Element and Prism Central need two-way communication for a number of reasons. Manageability, forecasting, alert visibility, and reporting in Prism Central all depend on periodic syncing of data from PE to PC. Prism Central’s VM and infrastructure management, image creation, DR orchestration, and other enhanced features like Calm require API communication from PC to PE.   PE-PC Connection Failure alerts indicate communicatio

I am using Nutanix on VSphere 6.5, and am affected by the 100% Memory usage alerts as described in KB article 000004465. I would like to create a folder in VSphere called Nutanix CVMs, which will not have the memory alerts enabled, and would like to move the CVM VMs in to this folder. Can anyone advise whether it’s safe to move a CVM VM in to another folder after is has been deployed? Part of me thinks this is a safe / normal procedure, as I’ve done it countless times with normal VMs. However, due to the complex nature of hyper-converged infrastructure and CVMs I understand I need to be very careful.   Thanks for your help   Jason  

NCC (Nutanix Cluster Check) is a framework of scripts that can help diagnose cluster health. NCC can be run provided that the individual nodes are up, regardless of the cluster state. NCC checks could be run from the Prism web console for clusters where AOS 5.0 or above and NCC 3.0 or above are installed.   Procedure: 1. Logon to the Prism web console. 2. Browse to Health page, select Actions > Run Checks

Logging into the cluster 5 times a day (we can’t imagine why but you’re the boss) and always re-attempt the login because you can never enter the password right? Concerned about the security of transmitting your password across the network? Looking for an extra security layer? All of these are valid reasons to enable key-based authentication for SSH sessions.   Generally speaking, there are two options: Go completely passwordless Use a combination of a public key and a password   How does it work? You generate a key pair (a public and a private keys) using RSA algorithm. You never share a private ke

Hi,  My CVM is reporting low on disk space and trying to cleanup. I tried to follow the KB1540 and noticed the logs directory needs to be clean up. Its consuming around 8.1G the rm cmd in article dont see to apply for logs folder. Any suggestion on how to free up space under logs safely? Can i winscp and delete the logs files?   Thanks CT

The new ESXi 7.0  has been released, does the latest version of nutanix 5.15 (LTS) support upgrades?

Let’s consider a scenario where you have two NX AHV clusters, A and B and there is an urgent need to move a VM from cluster A to cluster B.    What are the scenarios available?    Do you need to create a protection domain?  Do you need to import vdisks from cluster A to cluster B?  These are some questions which might be boggling your mind.    The following knowledge article helps to list the different scenarios ava

What is Prism Central? Prism Central is a Multi-cluster manager responsible for managing multiple Acropolis Clusters to provide a single, centralized management interface. Prism Central is an optional software appliance (VM) which can be deployed in addition to the Acropolis Cluster (can run on it). How to access Prism Central? Prism Central can be accessed using the IP address specified during configuration or corresponding DNS entry.   The figure shows an image illustrating the conceptual relationship between Prism Central and Prism Element:   Here is a brief explanations about each of the main pages in Prism Central UI: Home Page: Environment wide monitoring dashboard including detailed information on service status, capacity plannin

Hello, Are these any docs available which shows the setup between the Nutanix cluster and Prometheus/Grafana, similar to the one we have for Nagios https://next.nutanix.com/how-it-works-22/monitoring-nutanix-with-nagios-4500   Thanks.  

Would like to put together a report that would in detail break down the storage used by VM snapshots, as well as, storage used by Protection Domains.   Have been digging around and found a couple scripts that display some useful information however not quite what I’m looking for.  Anyone have an idea on how best to proceed?

I have an AHV VM that I would like to disconnect the NIC and connect the NIC in my script.  I need it disconnected while sysprep runs and sets a static IP address then I’m good to connect the NIC again.  (Otherwise it pulls a DHCP address and replaced the hostname with the DHCP address in DNS).   I can Get-NTNXVMNIC and see the current status of the NIC but I don’t see a way to change the status (i.e. I don’t find a Set-NTNXVMNIC command).   Thanks!   -TimG

Hi, Does anyone know exactly how many nodes can I install by Foundation 4.5 at one time? As I am going to write some internal docs related to Foundation so I do want to know.   Thanks.

NTP or Network Time Protocol is an integral component for any infrastructure as it allows for accurate timestamps of events across the environment. Whether it is relied on for monitoring, troubleshooting or services and applications operations – NTP source is one of the key components of modern IT infrastructure.it helps different systems to be in sync with each other.   Controller Virtual Machines (CVMs) are the backbone of Nutanix Hyper-converged Infrastructure. It is important for all the CVMs in the cluster to be in sync with each other. The CVMs use NTP to sync time between themselves within the cluster by after electing one of the CVMs as an NTP leader, even when an external NTP server is not configured, not available or not being used by design.    Is there a check which validates time sync between the CVMs? 

The Nutanix CVM is what runs the Nutanix software and serves all of the I/O operations to the hypervisor and all VMs running on that host hence it is of crucial importance to configure CMVs with the right amount of resources. The RAM and CPU allocation of the CVM both depend on the model of the nodes, the storage capacity of the cluster and the features used in the cluster. Each environment is unique in a way and each and every single one is dynamic by nature. Features are turned on and off, nodes upgrade, storage added. The following guide helps us to understand the memory requirement of the CVM for different models and features. The next time you are planning to add a feature or upgrade hardware in the cluster look at the minimum requirements to make sure that the cluster performance is not affected. After all there are very few things more satisfying than a smooth maintenance window.

On 31st March 2020 we made available our latest Long Term Support (LTS) release of AOS, version 5.15. This LTS release builds upon a mature and proven AOS codebase which customers have already been running successfully in their production environments.   End of Support Life (EOSL) and Release Information: AOS 5.15 is a Long Term Support (LTS) Release: Information on AOS Long Term Support (LTS) and Short Term Support (STS) Releases, please see KB 5505

Below are new knowledge base articles published on the week of March 29-April 4, 2020. KB 9119 - Alert A1159 "Flash Mode Usage Limit Exceeded" is not being raised KB 9123 - Alert - A160050 - FileServerConfigureNameServicesFailed KB 9130 - Clicking Source Entity = Container or Disk in an Alert/Event/Task will error out: "Storage Container or Disk with id '<UUID> ' was not found" KB 9131 - Prism Central (PC) 1-click deployment fails on Prism Element (PE) cluster version prior to 5.10.10, 5.11.2, 5.16 and 5.17

Hello, We build our vm images using packer and ansible and upload them to different endpoints. First time I uploaded the images to Prism Central using API v3 and batch processing. Prism Central deploys the image to all the cluster that are registrated. That works fine… BUT… HOW can i define the destination storage container on each cluster?? I can define placement policies etc but I cannot assign a category or policy to Storage Container. Prism Central always deploys the images to “SelfServiceContainer”. But we dont want that.

Hi everyone,I’m using the API to pull VM performance stats, however I’m having trouble interpreting what I’m seeing.For instance, I’m pulling “hypervisor.cpu_ready_time_ppm” for one of my VMs and getting the following output:{ "statsSpecificResponses": [ { "successful": true, "message": null, "startTimeInUsecs": 1576458000000000, "intervalInSecs": 30, "metric": "hypervisor.cpu_ready_time_ppm", "values": [ 108, 97, 144, 107, 89, 92, 78, 74, 47, 49, 90,.... Output truncated for brevityI get that the metric is a percentage but obviously you can’t have 144% of time, so how should I interpret these values?What I really need is a guide and/or reference that explains all of these metrics and how to interpret them.I found the following link but it doesn’t really tell me what I want to know:

When it comes to administering the Nutanix cluster, it's very important to control permissions and to restrict access to critical components such as CVMs, AHV hosts and the Prism UI. Any user that has write access to these components can make drastic changes to the Nutanix environment and thus to your organization’s production/testing environment. Here is how to reset the password for each of the components above: AHV | Root account password reset check out KB-7068 Reset Web Console or nCLI Password check out KB-1200 To recover CVM Password Through the Prism Web Console check out KB-2233